Maybe we should go on a chocolate-study-news diet

“We flood the American public with “health” news every
day. And the overload may very well cause confusion and disorientation
about what’s important in health and wellness in our everyday
lives….We’re losing people, drowning them in a sea of questionable or
downright useless health information.”

Well, here’s another dark chocolate wave in the flood.

The BringMeTheNews website cannibalized other sources to report, “Discovery: Dark chocolate may help walking ability.”
Why a site that purports to deliver “the best stories that affect our
readers: Minnesotans” would cherry pick the hype and ignore the caveats
about a tiny, short-term study done in Italy is beyond me. Except that
it’s chocolate.

How big was the study? 20 people.

How much was walking ability improved? 17 seconds longer and 39 feet
farther. One reader left a comment after the BringMeTheNews story: “17
seconds longer??? Wow, pretty great improvement.”

BringMeTheNews actually just brought you the news that Reuters,
Medpage Today and NPR had already reported. Only they left out some of
the important caveats that the other sources included.

BringMeTheNews didn’t include any of the cautious comments in the way NPR ended its story:

“Do the results suggest that chocolate could be used as treatment?

Not so fast. As physician Mark Creager of Brigham and Women’s
Hospital, who reviewed the study, points out, “The overall effect [of
the dark chocolate] was relatively modest.”

In an email, he pointed out to us that the 11 percent increase in
walking distance doesn’t add up to much — only about 40 extra feet.

“To put this in context,” says Creager, “with other forms of
treatment, such as supervised exercise training, maximal walking
distance increases by approximately 100 percent.”

Creager says the new study highlights the potential role of
antioxidant treatment, but he says follow-up studies, including a larger
number of participants, would be needed to see if the findings hold
up.”

The limitations that MedPage Today pointed out in its story were also not picked up by BringMeTheNews :

Natalie Evans, MD, of the Cleveland Clinic, who was not involved with the study, said further research is warranted.

“The study was really small, so I think it is hard to know how
significant ultimately this will be,” she said, adding that restricting
the study population to patients with intermittent claudication (IC) was
another limitation.

“There is a huge population out there with peripheral artery disease,
but only about 11% of them actually have intermittent claudication,”
she said. “I think it would be really interesting to find out what
impact dark chocolate would have on [patients without this
complication].” …

“Who wouldn’t want to eat dark chocolate to feel better?” Evans said.
“But I think there is a lot more bang for your buck in terms of
managing traditional risk factors for PAD (peripheral artery disease).”
This includes convincing PAD patients who smoke to kick the habit and
urging them to maintain a healthy weight so they don’t develop diabetes,
she said.

And Reuters Health had this from a Mayo cardiologist – also not used by BringMeTheNews:

“(The study) should be considered a
proof‐of‐concept study that is potentially useful to understand the
mechanism of disease related to intermittent claudication (the leg blood flow problem)
but not transferable to clinical practice because of small sample size
and the design of the study. Further study, in fact, should be done to
assess whether similar changes may be detected with long‐term dark
chocolate administration. The study is also limited by its
single‐blinded design and the lack of a placebo group. Some data
interpretation is based essentially on indirect evidence. Thus, we have
only indirect evidence that vasodilatation is the mechanism accounting
for walking autonomy increase, because direct analysis of peripheral
circulation has not been done.”

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